Facebook / Jason Dunn
A hair-raising video captured the moment a small plane came dangerously close to crashing into a Colorado mountain.
A Cessna 152 was seen nosediving toward the ground on the Fourth of July before swooping up at the last second, just feet before it hit the ground.
“It was coming straight at us,” Jason Dunn, who was hiking Devil’s Thumb with his family, posted to Facebook.
They were sitting near the top of the trail, which is south of Rocky Mountain National Park, when the tiny aircraft swooped through the valley, headed from Boulder to the east, and narrowly missed the ground.
“It was clear the plane was struggling trying to clear the saddle,” Dunn, a former pilot from Denver, wrote in his post.
His son, Tyler, captured the harrowing moment on video. “There’s a plane. Oh my god. It’s like right there,” he could be heard saying.
Dunn said he feared the craft would go into an aerodynamic stall.
“Then it either did, or the pilot made a last ditch effort to turn the plane around in a dead end valley before crashing into the mountain (or us),” he wrote.
“As you can see, he made it by less than a couple of feet.”
Viewers were shocked by the close call that the family witnessed.
“What a crazy experience!” commented one. “So glad you weren’t calling in a crash.”
The plane had stalled and descended, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, before landing safely at its destination.
The agency said it was not known how many people were aboard, though the Cessna 152 only seats two passengers. The incident is under investigation.
The plane had taken off from Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport just after 9 a.m. and landed back there about half an hour later, according to flight records.